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A firm hand, that's what's needed. If only the Brits had gone with the BUF like Singapore did the PAP:
https://joestudwell.wordpress.com/category/gift-ideas/
The PAP’s logo may have been inspired by that of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, but the PAP has enjoyed considerably more success and longevity.
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Harry made the trains run on time, amirite?
As per usual, you manage to snatch nonsense out of the mouth of reason. Your priggisness and puerile posturings do you credit.Quote:
Originally Posted by sabang
Singapore was no more renown for its sleaze in the world than Australia. Every city has its sleazy underbelly except of course Bangkok which, like most of the country, is positively riven with whores and prostitution and is no more than one gigantic brothel. To define the city state of Singapore as a sleaze destination in 1960s would be as invalid and erroneous as labelling London as such because of Soho. Only an ignoramus or an imbecile would consider the place as such.
Singapore was a bustling and thriving place in 1966, when I first arrived, and was already well established as a successful entrepôt with the completion of the Jurong deep water berths in 1965 paving the way for creation of their industrial park.
I have no idea what you are wittering on about with your babblings on the subject of " death rooms ". We in the West call these places care homes and we send all our old people who prove troublesome with their dementia to them to die. Given the grievous costs of these homes, most properties owned by the residents are sold and the proceeds given to the companies who own the care homes. Given the absence of opiates in our regime I rather think the oriental death house was a better bet in meeting one's maker
Singapore was a great place in 1966 and already established as a state with a sound future.
1966 would have been a year in which to feel optimistic about Singapore, I expect.
Joe Studwell's obituary offers an interesting point of view on what Lee was and what he did and didn't achieve:
https://joestudwell.wordpress.com/20...ay-gone-today/
Harry yesterday, gone today
Harry Lee Kuan Yew has passed on.
He leaves us just as Singaporeans are finally falling out of love with his People’s Action Party, as I blogged after visiting Singapore last October. It is a pretty good record for someone who started out in politics in the 1950s.
Harry’s departure severs the direct link between south-east Asia’s political elite and its colonial past. (Mahathir is still alive, but he was not a player in the colonial era.) This seems to me to be the key import of this moment. There won’t be another Harry, born into an Anglicised and privileged family, angered yet titillated by colonial power, driven to reinvent himself as a true Chinese (and struggle to learn the Chinese language that was foreign to him as a kid), then striving to find a happy medium as Singapore’s leader somewhere between Asian nationalist and American lickspittle. He opted for a combination of proto-Victorian morality re-dressed-up as Asian values, and the biggest CIA station in the region, that saw American lickspittle win comfortably.
Pragmatism is I think what defined Harry more than anything. He was a fantastic leader for Singapore. But he didn’t really give a toss about south-east Asia so long as Singapore was ok. In this sense he was a modernisation of British governors of the Crown Colony of Singapore. Smarter, more savvy, more efficient than any colonial goon, but at the end of the day nothing very different. He provided phenomenal leadership, and he led by example. But the notion he had ‘vision’ at the level of south-east Asian politics and development does not stand up for me.
So goodbye Harry. I think of you as the full-on Chinese student at Cambridge, with your motorbike and your cigarettes, determined to prove you were better than the gweilos, even if what mattered most to you all too often was their approbation. I wonder: did you used to flick your cigarette butts away on the street, such that you would have been fined in Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore? We may never know.
A nicely judged piece and I think a fairly astute insight into the man and his motivation.
I actually remember him speaking in an interview in the 60s amid the many social campaigns he instigated and recall him actually exhorting his people to be " like the British ". Of course, at the time Britain was signing it's economic death warrant in appeasing the unions which fostered the terminal decline in workers' productivity from which we are only just recovering, but we knew what he meant - he really was extolling the proclaimed Victorian virtues of steadfastness, industrousness, thrift and fulfilling one's duty in service of the country.
In the end, he just couldn't trust his people and imposed a discipline in lieu of permitting them to realise their own sense of personal responsibility, a flaw which could well crack the foundation of his contrived society.
Agreed.Quote:
Originally Posted by Seekingasylum
'Pragmatic' we can perhaps agree on, but when people talk about 'ethics' and 'enlightenment' well, quite honestly I have to wonder if the misplaced apostrophe crew actually know what the 'word's' mean. ;)